The Islamic Manuscript Tradition


Book Description

The rich and varied traditions of Islamic book art




The Book in the Islamic World


Book Description

The Book in the Islamic World brings together serious studies on the book as an intellectual entity and as a vehicle of cultural development. Written by a group of distinguished scholars, it examines and reflects upon this unique tool of communication not as a physical artifact but as a manifestation of the aspirations, values, and wisdom of Arabs and Muslims in general. The Islamic system of book production differed from that of the West. This volume shows the peculiarities of book making and the intellectual principles that governed a book's inner structure, mysteries, and impact on culture. Investigated and explained are the issues involved in printing; the compilation of the Koran, the most important book in Islam; attitudes toward books; the oral versus the written tradition; metaphors of the book in literature; biographical dictionaries, an important genre of Islamic books; the grammatical tradition; women's contribution to calligraphy; scientific manuscripts; the transition from scribal to print culture; publishing in the modern Arab World; and the new electronic media, a non-book vehicle of communication, and its impact on education.




The Manuscript Tradition of the Islamic West


Book Description

Explores the aesthetic dimensions, cultural significance and ideological power of Maghribī manuscripts This book traces the history of manuscript production in the Islamic West, between the 10th and the 12th centuries. It interrogates the material evidence that survives from this period, paying special attention to the origin and development of Maghribī round scripts, the distinctive form of Arabic writing employed in al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia) and Northwest Africa. More than 200 dated manuscripts written in Maghribī round scripts - many of which have not previously been published and are of great historical significance - are presented and discussed. This allows for a reconstruction of the activity of Maghribī calligraphers, copyists, notaries and secretaries, and a better understanding of the development of their practices. A blend of art historical methods, palaeographic analyses and a thorough scrutiny of Arabic sources paints a comprehensive and lively picture of Maghribī manuscript culture - from its beginnings under the Umayyads of Cordova up to the heyday of the Almohad caliphate. This book lifts the veil on a glorious, yet neglected season in the history of Arabic calligraphy, shedding new light on a tradition that was crucial for the creation of the Andalusi identity and its spread throughout the medieval Mediterranean. Key Features  Exposes the richness and sophistication of Maghribī manuscript culture, including parchment- and papermaking, calligraphy, illumination, bookbinding and chancery practices  Approaches social and cultural history through the study of manuscripts as artefacts  Shows that calligraphy and scribal practices were a key element in the construction of political and identity discourses  Includes a comprehensive catalogue of 252 dated manuscripts in Maghribī round scripts (including Qur'ans and chancery documents), the majority of which are unpublished  Lavishly illustrated with over 100 colour images Umberto Bongianino is Departmental Lecturer in Islamic Art and Architecture at the Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford.




The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp


Book Description

"The publication of this book commemorates the one thousandth anniversary of the completion of the Shahnama, the Persian national epic, which was written down in more than 50,000 couplets by the poet Firdausi. It also celebrates the most lavishly illustrated version of this text, a manuscript produced for the Safavid Shah Tahmasp, who ruled Iran from 1524 to 1576"--Director's Foreword, p. 7.




Islamic Manuscripts of Late Medieval Rum, 1270s-1370s


Book Description

Between the Mongol invasions in the mid-13th century and the rise of the Ottomans in the late 14th century, the Lands of Rum were marked by instability and conflict. Despite this, a rich body of illuminated manuscripts from the period survives, explored here in this extensively illustrated volume. Meticulously analysing 15 beautifully decorated Arabic and Persian manuscripts, including Qur'ans, mirrors-for-princes, historical chronicles and Sufi works, Cailah Jackson traces the development of calligraphy and illumination in late medieval Anatolia. She shows that the central Anatolian city of Konya, in particular, was a dynamic centre of artistic activity and that local Turcoman princes, Seljuk bureaucrats and Mevlevi dervishes all played important roles in manuscript production and patronage.




The Trans-Saharan Book Trade


Book Description

Concerned with the history of scholarly production, book markets and trans-Saharan exchanges in Muslim African (primarily western and northern Africa), as well as the creation of manuscript libraries, this book consists of a collection of twelve essays that examine these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective.




Islamic Art and Architecture 650-1250


Book Description

This richly illustrated book provides an unsurpassed overview of Islamic art and architecture from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries, a time of the formation of a new artistic culture and its first, medieval, flowering in the vast area from the Atlantic to India. Inspired by Ettinghausen and Grabar’s original text, this book has been completely rewritten and updated to take into account recent information and methodological advances. The volume focuses special attention on the development of numerous regional centers of art in Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, Iraq, and Yemen, as well as the western and northeastern provinces of Iran. It traces the cultural and artistic evolution of such centers in the seminal early Islamic period and examines the wealth of different ways of creating a beautiful environment. The book approaches the arts with new classifications of architecture and architectural decoration, the art of the object, and the art of the book. With many new illustrations, often in color, this volume broadens the picture of Islamic artistic production and discusses objects in a wide range of media, including textiles, ceramics, metal, and wood. The book incorporates extensive accounts of the cultural contexts of the arts and defines the originality of each period. A final chapter explores the impact of Islamic art on the creativity of non-Muslims within the Islamic realm and in areas surrounding the Muslim world.




The Arabic Manuscript Tradition


Book Description

The present work supplements the original volume of The Arabic Manuscript Tradition (AMT), both its glossary of technical terms and bibliography. It includes new entries of technical terms, additional definitions of, and/or citations for, the entries already found in AMT, and recent publications on various aspects of Arabic manuscript studies.




The History of the Book in the Middle East


Book Description

This selection of papers by scholarly specialists offers an introduction to the history of the book and book culture in West Asia and North Africa from antiquity to the 20th century. The flourishing and long-lived manuscript tradition is discussed in its various aspects - social and economic as well as technical and aesthetic. The very early but abortive introduction of printing - long before Gutenberg - and the eventual, belated acceptance of the printed book and the development of print culture are explored in further groups of papers. Cultural, aesthetic, technological, religious, social, political and economic factors are all considered throughout the volume. Although the articles reflect the predominance in the area of Muslim books - Arabic, Persian and Turkish - the Hebrew, Syriac and Armenian contributions are also discussed. The editor’s introduction provides a survey of the field from the origins of writing to the modern literary and intellectual revivals.




A Muslim American Slave


Book Description

Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling “the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language,” as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic. In A Muslim American Slave, scholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Said’s narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction, contextual essays and historical commentary by leading literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora, photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction and by photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The volume also includes contextual essays and historical commentary by literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora: Michael A. Gomez, Allan D. Austin, Robert J. Allison, Sylviane A. Diouf, Ghada Osman, and Camille F. Forbes. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians